A Search for Portus Setantiorum

Claudius Ptolemaeus b.100AD, d.170A.D., was a Roman citizen of Macedonian descent living and working in Alexandria, Egypt.

He was a celebrated geographer and astrologer who lived between the reigns of Hadrian and Antonine in the second century A.D. The Library at Alexandria was destroyed either in 272 or 292 A.D. so Ptolemy's map of Brittanica was lost for over a thousand years until copies were found in the 15th century.

Portus Setantiorum, shown on this map was the only pre-Roman port on the West coast of Britain. During the Covid pandemic starting in 2020 I decided to try and find this lost port thinking it could be found with a combination of modern aerial photography, LIDAR imagery, and magnetometer images.

There are a number of free sources of LIDAR images and I used data from the Environment Agency's website for this project.

On one site I created a geophysics image which was accomplished by using a home made magnetometer consisting of an iPhone 7+ with Physics Toolbox Sensor Suite IOS App attached to a selfie stick. By walking a grid pattern over the site a data set was produced that could be imported into Snuffler PC Geophysics software to produce an image.

This document summarises my finds and I hope you find it interesting.